Biography

Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. In recent years, his research interests ranged from the colonial history of international law to the examination of new trends in the field of human rights law, such as current experiences of transitional justice in South America and the recent grant of legal personhood and rights to non-human beings in different jurisdictions over the globe. His approach is fundamentally philosophical, interdisciplinary, and critical.

At the EUI, Alexis will be working on a project titled ‘Non-Human Rights. New Legal Persons in Post-human Times’. There, he will expand on his previous research and examine the granting of rights to non-human animals, rivers, mountains, rainforests and artificially intelligent beings. The process of giving personhood to non-humans has gained incredible traction in recent years and has the potential to usher in a radical change of paradigm in the legal domain that can have enormous cultural implications. Alexis will attempt to grasp the challenges involved in this trend and its potential consequences.

Alexis has lectured and convened courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level on legal theory, criminal law, human rights law and public international law at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of London.

Additionally, he has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History and the University of Barcelona. Before becoming a full-time academic, Alexis was a practising human rights lawyer and held different positions in the administration of justice of Argentina.